The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon

At the dawn of World War I, a young English poet exchanged his pastoral pursuits of cricket, fox-hunting, and romantic verse for army life amid the muddy trenches of France. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) began the war with a sense of noble enterprise and fought fiercely, earning the nickname "Mad Jack" for his daring, near-suicidal assaults on enemy lines. His growing disillusionment with the tactics employed by the British army and with homefront profiteering culminated in a different act ...